In late June, China’s top legislature, the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress (NPCSC), overhauled the Public Security Administration Punishments Law (PSAPL) – a statute that defines close to 200 “public-security violations.” Prototypical offenses include street brawls and petty thefts, but the law also covers conduct that the public tends to find more reprehensible, such as drug use. Although public security violations can result in up to 15 days of detention, they, by definition, are less serious than and thus are not considered “crimes.”
In fall 2023, the draft PSAPL revision made headlines because of a later-abandoned ban on publicly wearing clothing that “hurts the feelings of the Chinese people.” As the revised law is about to take effect next year, it was recently back in the spotlight, after official publicity campaigns created an unexpected online firestorm surrounding a once-obscure provision.
The controversy began on Douyin. On November 27, a Xinjiang drug rehab center’s account posted a short video highlighting Article 136 of the law, though not without editorialization. Article 136 is a new provision requiring the police to seal – that is, prohibiting them from disclosing – the records of all PSAPL violations, unless the relevant state or private entities otherwise have lawful authority to make inquiries. Drug offenses are obviously covered, but so is each of the other 100-plus offenses under the law. This did not prevent the rehab center from singling out the former, however.
The account of a local tourism bureau then asked in the comments, “So which young master was using?” (哪位少爷吸了), insinuating that Article 136 is designed to shield the drug-abusing offspring of the rich and powerful from public exposure. This comment instantly went viral, generating a torrent of backlash against the record-sealing requirement.
Besides predominantly substantive criticisms of Article 136, social media users also objected to how it was adopted in the first place. They targeted leading legal professionals who had written or spoken in support of sealing PSAPL records, particularly Professors Zhao Hong and Lao Dongyan. Some netizens accused academics of pushing their insidious agenda into law by exerting outsized influence over the legislative process. The topic “controversy over Professor Zhao Hong’s bill to seal drug records” (赵宏教授吸毒史封存法案争议) even briefly trended on Weibo before censors took it down.
Relatedly, others criticized the absence of consultation on the draft in which Article 136 first appeared in its final form, implying procedural manipulation by bad actors inside or outside the legislature.
The first charge amounts to a conspiracy theory. The second correctly notes the lack of consultation on that particular draft, but the NPCSC acted by the book (such as it is) in this case and did nothing untoward. In our view, the controversy over Article 136 nevertheless exposed a more alarming problem: The Chinese legislature’s public engagement mechanisms – meant to both inform and consult the public about its legislative activities – may not be functioning effectively.
The PSAPL Revision Process
To set the stage, we’ll briefly trace the PSAPL revision’s legislative journey, focusing on Article 136. As generally required for major legislation, the bill went through three rounds of review over a 22-month period from 2023 to 2025.
It first came before the NPCSC in August 2023. The original draft, principally drafted by the Ministry of Public Security, required record-sealing for juvenile offenders only. After this reading, the legislature published the draft for a monthlong online consultation, which drew over 100,000 commenters – the vast majority of whom presumably opposed the controversial “hurt feelings” provision – while the record-sealing rule attracted little attention. In the meantime, the legislature’s subordinate bodies solicited feedback from a wide range of state organs and private parties – including relevant experts and scholars – through official channels, field research, and seminars.
Then, through a rather opaque process, those bodies processed the feedback and revised the initial draft. Although they do not disclose (not in any meaningful detail, at least) what comments were received and why they were accepted or rejected, they do appear to afford significant weight to public comments. In the resulting second draft, the requirement to seal juvenile records remained intact.
The bill’s second reading occurred in June 2024, followed by a similar round of opinion-seeking, including a 30-day online consultation on the second draft, and further edits. The subsequent third draft expanded the record-sealing provision to cover adult offenders. According to its accompanying legislative report, this change was requested by “NPCSC members, [central] departments, localities, experts and scholars, and members of the public,” who argued that the Communist Party’s 2024 Third Plenum decision to seal the records of “minor crimes” should also apply to public security violations, which are by definition even less severe.
Finally, on June 26, 2025, the NPCSC approved the third draft after minor final edits, without further public consultation – as is standard practice. A few days earlier, in fact, a legislative spokesperson had disclosed the forthcoming change to Article 136, revealing that it was among the main suggestions from the second round of online consultation. Officials again highlighted Article 136 in interviews and writings after the bill passed. Available evidence therefore shows that authorities did not view expanding the record-sealing requirement as a major change – or at least expected the public to welcome it.
Addressing Netizens’ Procedural Criticisms
Turning back to the online opprobrium. The personal attacks on Professor Zhao Hong and her colleagues could be addressed swiftly. They undoubtedly supported the reform and were presumably involved in the legislative process as experts. But it was the Ministry of Public Security that initially proposed Article 136’s predecessor, before the legislature expanded its scope to reflect a seeming consensus rooted in the party’s new policy. Thus, whether or not one thinks Article 136 embodies good policy, it is absurd to scapegoat the legal academy, let alone a few law professors.
The other criticism – that the NPCSC dispensed with public consultation on the major last-minute change to Article 136 to “smuggle it in” – merits closer examination. Admittedly, the public could not comment on (or see) the third draft, but this is not unique to the PSAPL revision. And the legislature’s efforts to draw attention to Article 136 – both before and after its enactment – belie the claim that it acted with an ulterior motive. Of course, it would defeat the purpose of opinion-seeking if the legislature could drastically rework a bill without further public engagement. Yet it would be equally untenable to either require a new round of comment whenever it changes a draft or forbid revisions even to address negative feedback. Deviation from a prior draft should be allowed unless it is too substantial to provide “fair notice” of what is to come (to borrow a roughly analogous U.S. legal standard).
The NPCSC’s internal norm generally requires it to resolve “difficult issues” between a bill’s second and third readings, so it can pass on schedule. And we do observe that revisions at this stage tend to be more limited than the initial round and usually refine existing rules rather than introduce entirely new ones. Whether a change is substantial enough to require additional public consultation presents a difficult line-drawing problem, and so does the expansion of Article 136’s scope.
Yet however one views the magnitude of this change – indeed, we two authors disagree – the Chinese public (or at least a highly vocal segment thereof) appears to overwhelmingly oppose sealing all PSAPL records and favor, at a minimum, a carve-out for drug offenses. Had the legislature anticipated this pushback, it could have extended the process and sought comments anew.
The NPCSC also had other options to preempt the controversy without delaying the bill’s passage. It could have held separate votes on alternatives to Article 136 – a procedure available since 2015 but never used. Or, even if it still opted to proceed with an across-the-board requirement, it could have held a press conference in June to proactively justify the reform and reaffirm the government’s “tough stance” on drugs.
Flaws in Public Engagement
That Article 136 ended up provoking such an online uproar suggests that the NPCSC’s public engagement mechanisms may be malfunctioning, limiting its ability to accurately gauge public opinion and inform the Chinese people about its work.
Online public consultation, introduced in 2005, remains the legislature’s primary tool of public engagement. Scholars view it as a way to ameliorate the NPCSC’s “democratic deficit,” for its members face no meaningful electoral pressure, and citizen involvement has been modest at best. For the 238 draft laws published since 2018, for example, a median of only 325 (non-unique) individuals commented on each. This accords with prior research showing that Chinese citizens were more motivated to participate when they could perceive a direct personal stake in the legislation (e.g., demographic-specific laws). By contrast, participation tends to drop sharply when a law offers only diffuse benefits to a broader public – with environmental legislation being the archetypal case.
Obstacles to broader participation are legion. Some citizens may simply be unaware of an ongoing consultation. Others may feel unmotivated to participate because it is unclear how public comments shape legislation, if at all. Still others may wish to provide input but find the task insurmountable, as the legislature typically releases too little information to enable the average citizen to submit informed comments. Orchestrated campaigns by civil society groups and other private parties can raise awareness and reduce information barriers, but they occur infrequently and legislative officials on one occasion dismissed mass comments.
While a well-above-average 4,762 people commented on the PSAPL revision’s second draft, this was a 95 percent drop from the first round. Anecdotal Weibo comments suggest that the opportunity nonetheless eluded some netizens, while many others had not fully grasped Article 136’s implications until the Xinjiang rehab center’s post went viral. In short, the NPCSC likely did not hear from a representative, informed cross-section of the public on the draft.
Perhaps aware of the shortcomings of online public consultations, since 2015, the NPCSC has been designating selected grassroots institutions – primarily local people’s congresses – as “grassroots legislative outreach offices” to create a supplemental information channel. It relies on those offices and their corps of volunteers to solicit input from local communities directly and in a targeted manner. Not all offices necessarily work on every bill, however, nor are the comments they collect disclosed to the public. They therefore suffer from similar transparency and representation deficits.
Finally, the controversy over Article 136 exposed the limitations of the legislature’s broader public education efforts. The public appears uninformed about the basics of the legislative process or holds distorted views of how the NPCSC operates – a knowledge gap that has allowed conspiracy theories to take hold. In addition, the NPCSC’s continued silence more than two weeks after the controversy erupted – and as online debate lingers – demonstrates its rigid approach to public communication: a general reluctance to engage with public concerns outside pre-scheduled occasions.
What Can Be Done
To point out the problems is to also identify the solutions. Here are just some of the ways the NPCSC could enhance public engagement in lawmaking. It could leverage social media and recruit private partners to publicize engagement opportunities. To make the process more accessible, it could provide detailed, article-by-article explanations of draft laws – something it did once recently, as if by accident.
It could update its two-decade-old consultation format by, for instance, requesting commenters to address specific issues instead of expecting them to read entire drafts for potentially salient provisions. It could encourage participation through greater transparency: releasing detailed summaries of public comments (as it once did) and publicly responding to significant comments and criticisms (consistent with a 2021 legal reform document). Finally, it should bring back post-session press conferences (largely discontinued since 2020) to discuss new legislation in depth and address potential concerns early on.
The Chinese legislature should recognize that public engagement can strengthen its institutional legitimacy, improve the quality of laws, and generate popular support for them. It should strive to ensure that such engagement is broad-based and effective, especially because it lacks meaningful electoral accountability. Otherwise, as a Chinese scholar has warned, when formal channels for public participation prove ineffective, public sentiment tends to surface in more disruptive ways.
Let the controversy over Article 136 be a cautionary tale.
